RECIPE
Borough of Agriculture BY JEFF HAGAN ’86
Chef, grower, and creator Raina Leora Robinson ’16 is cofounder of the culinary nonprofit Cafe Forsaken, a worker-owner at Woke Foods, and assistant baker at Anti-Conquest Bread Co.—three enterprises that offer community food relief in the Bronx where she lives. “I’ve always been a creative person who didn’t have an outlet but felt a lot of creative energy,” 12
she says. She found that outlet in food, and more specifically in food justice. At Oberlin, Robinson was a member of Third World Co-op (TWC) and during breaks held food industry jobs in New York. When she was 20, her father died from liver cancer. “When he was sick, I was working at this really bougie juice bar in Manhattan. It was a green juice, like a spinach, kale, cucumber kind of situation. It cost about $12 for a 16-ounce juice. And I thought, ‘That’s interesting— who’s buying this, and why have I never heard of it?’ Whether the
health claims were true or not, it was just the idea. “Thinking of what I didn’t have access to at home, and then comparing that to being in a food co-op at Oberlin and all of the things I was learning there, some things became apparent to me.” When a family friend— pioneering food justice advocate Karen Washington—opened a farmer’s market in the Bronx, Robinson jumped at the chance to work there. “Oh, wow—Black people in the Bronx farm! It opened my eyes,” Robinson says. “She showed me community gardens
and stuff upstate that was not on my radar. It felt so far away, but it actually wasn’t. Suddenly I had access to so many vegetables that I didn’t know existed. That was really interesting to me.” With the COVID-19 pandemic making life even harder for those on the edge—including people like Robinson and her food industry colleagues who lost income sources—Robinson shifted her work to providing direct food relief. “As a member of TWC, the community and having fellowship in the kitchen with all of my friends—that was really
ILUSTRATIONS: MAY VAN MILLINGEN
Thought Process